Ed Ou for The New York Times
Former supporters of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan say his response to the Taksim Square protests was the final straw.
ISTANBUL — For Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the antigovernment protests that have shaken Turkey have come with a jarring paradox: some of the protesters voted for him, most prospered from his economic policies, and some of the liberal intellectuals and columnists now calling him a dictator helped him win three successive elections with their writings.
For Turkey’s liberals and urban elite, including some among the young, middle-class protesters who camped out in Gezi Park in Taksim Square here, the intense police crackdown — the use of tear gas and water cannons, and the detention of protesters, lawyers, journalists and medics — represented the final and most painful break with Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party.
“The Gezi Park-Taksim thing has been the breaking point for the left,” said Cengiz Candar, a popular columnist who once supported Mr. Erdogan for his efforts to reduce the power of the military and to pursue membership in the European Union.
“It’s not us that changed,” he added. “We remain as democrats; we want to extend individual liberties.”
As Mr. Erdogan rose to power, many liberals, unlike members of Turkey’s old secular elite, who worried about a hidden Islamist agenda, overlooked Mr. Erdogan’s religious roots. They saw his faith in the context of personal freedom, not as a threat to Turkey’s secular tradition. They embraced him for his pursuit of European Union membership, now stalled, and for securing civilian authority over the military, whose influence had been pre-eminent in Turkey.
Turks were joined by many Europeans and Americans, including President Obama, who embraced the democratic reforms that Mr. Erdogan implemented. Now, many of those onetime supporters say Mr. Erdogan and his party have taken a decisive turn toward authoritarianism, leaving them to face a period of self-reflection.
“I was one of the European liberals who supported A.K.P. policies,” said Joost Lagendijk, a former member of the European Parliament and columnist who lives in Turkey, referring to the Turkish initials of Mr. Erdogan’s party. “There was a lot of sympathy for the reforms they were implementing.”
Mr. Lagendijk said that he was never an ideological bedfellow of the A.K.P., but that he was attracted by Mr. Erdogan’s early pragmatism and by his support for constitutional changes to secure individual liberties and advances in rights for Turkey’s Kurdish minority.
“I’m a Green, I’m a liberal,” he said. “I’m not conservative or religious, but it didn’t matter.”
These days, Mr. Lagendijk has had to fend off critics from his own liberal flank, who have been sending him Twitter messages and e-mails that all conveyed the same message: We told you so.
Over the past few years, Mr. Erdogan had begun alienating his liberal supporters by intimidating the news media and pursuing large urban development projects without public feedback. Then in recent weeks a group of protesters trying to save a city park from demolition were met with a fierce police response, setting off the larger antigovernment street movement that challenged Mr. Erdogan, whose response to the crisis confirmed for many of his former supporters that he had taken a path they could no longer support.
Beyond his democratic promises, many experts say Mr. Erdogan’s charisma won over many liberals years ago.
Jenny B. White, an anthropologist at Boston University, spent time in Turkey in the 1990s researching the rise of Islamist movements, and followed Mr. Erdogan around while he was mayor of Istanbul.
“He would ignore a table of bearded mayors after an event and talk to me like I was the only person in the world,” she said. “There is that aspect of it that really captured people.”
She added, “The liberals voted for him because when he was elected in 2002 he did all these things liberals only dreamed of.”
Not all on the left have broken with Mr. Erdogan. Mursana Memecan, a member of Parliament from the A.K.P. who is close to Mr. Erdogan and identifies herself as a liberal, said she helped arrange meetings between some of the protest leaders and Mr. Erdogan in hope of brokering a compromise, and winning back some of his former supporters. That did not happen, though, as a tentative deal to save the park was disavowed by most protesters, and Mr. Erdogan ordered a decisive police raid on Saturday to clear the park.
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